


The Bet

by Orockthro



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Drinking, Gen, Multi, OT3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-15 01:54:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4588590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She looks just as relaxed and at home on 34th street in a cream and orange scalloped dress as she did under a German car, and damn, if it isn’t an enjoyable sight. Right up until she says, “So you were thrown out of one club. So what? That is nothing.”<br/>He stares at Gaby, incredulous, for a long moment. “You’re a car mechanic from East Berlin. Just how many clubs have you been to?”</p><p>  <i>(Or, on their first night in New York City working for UNCLE, Gaby issues a challenge to Napoleon. Napoleon, with some help, accepts.)</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bet

**Author's Note:**

> (Well this escalated quickly.)  
> Thanks to Saathi1013 for the quick beta!

THE BET

“Oh please, as if you could do better.”

Napoleon stops, mid stride. “Excuse me?”

They’ve been in Manhattan for thirty six hours, twenty four of them awake and on the move, prowling through New York City like caged beasts. The more he thinks about it, the less sure he is that they aren’t. Neither Gaby nor Kuryakin have been in the United States before, and for Gaby, it’s her first time in the West completely. Napoleon himself hasn’t been able to travel without a CIA handler dogging his every step for well over five years. The air, dank and rotten like New York air always is, is intoxicating. It is free. He can see it on Gaby’s face, too, even on Kuryakin’s mulish, grumpy mug.

They’re drunk with it.

Waverly, if that truly is his name, said, “Everything’s been cleared with your respective agencies. Report in on Monday morning. Until then, don’t get arrested,” as they walked off the private jet onto the boiling hot tarmac of the equally private airport those hours ago. Of course, he didn’t tell them _where_  to report in, but Napoleon isn’t worried. He got one tracker on the man, and is reasonably sure Kuryakin got at least two. He’s also reasonably sure that Gaby, taking it all in stride, is probably ten times as informed as the two of them in regards to their new employment.

She looks just as relaxed and at home on 34th street in a cream and orange scalloped dress as she did under a German car, and damn, if it isn’t an enjoyable sight. Right up until she says, “So you were thrown out of one club. So what? That is nothing.”

Kuryakin, a few steps behind him and towering next to Gaby, so clearly besotted with her it hurts to look at, nods solemnly.

He stares at Gaby, incredulous, for a long moment. “You’re a car mechanic from East Berlin. Just how many clubs have you been to?”

She winks at him, and pulls her white-framed sunglasses down from where they were nestled in her perfect hair and onto the adorable bridge of her nose. “Mechanics know how to have fun, too, you know.”

In hindsight, it is possibly the worst plan Napoleon has ever come up with sober, but in his defence, he is still celebrating having slipped the CIA’s leash, suffering a concussion, and a significant case of nostalgia for the New York he used to know. He’s also still celebrating not being in prison. He’ll be celebrating that for a few more years yet.

“Want to bet?” he asks.

She squints. Manhattan in the afternoon is bright, and she slips her sunglasses down her nose until they nearly slide right off. “Tonight. Meet at the hotel by 9AM tomorrow morning or you’re disqualified. Whoever is tossed out of the most clubs wins. Loser buys the winner a whole night of drinks.”

He shakes her hand, slipping off her bracelet. “Done.” He’ll give it back. Later.

He takes Illya with him. The man is a giant, and he fully intends to use that to his advantage. “Just pull a few cars apart. It’s not as if you haven’t done it before.”

“You realize I am a KGB agent in America. I do not have a death wish.”

“You realize that if we win this bet, Gaby will--”

“If  _I_  win this bet.”

They’re outside a club Napoleon has never been to before. He hasn’t spent more than a few nights in New York in the last five years, and clubs spring up and close down like mayflies. He pauses at the door. “She made the bet with me, Peril.”

“Then you don’t need me,” the giant says, turning just slightly with his hands in his pockets. What Kuryakin needs is to work on his poker face. What Kuryakin _wants_ , though, is to kiss Gaby with all the tenderness and likely all the skill of a puppy.

First rule of negotiation, and all theft, all graft, is negotiation, just with a party that doesn’t know what’s being negotiated, is to know what your opponent wants.

“Then let me make a deal with you.”

The giant turns back to face him, eyes flicking from Napoleon’s face to the door, telegraphing everything. “I’m listening.”

“I don’t need an ex-car mechanic to buy me drinks--”

It shouldn’t be endearing how red Peril’s face gets at that, nor should it be endearing that he says, “She is your superior now--” and gets too flustered to finish before Napoleon can interrupt him.

“I get free drinks everywhere I go. You, however, need it very badly. Get me kicked out of every club from here to the ocean and the... reward... is yours. If you don’t, then I guess I’ll just have to enjoy Gaby’s company alone.”

“This is not a deal. This is a threat.”

Napoleon smiles. “Is it?”

They start the night with a club called The Green Glass. It actually has, somewhat to Napoleon’s surprise, a large, thick, tacky-looking drinking tankard the size of a man’s head on display. “Don’t touch that,” says the bartender. Red Peril touches it with both fists.

(One.)

Then it’s onto a bar, Nightengale, where Napoleon orders the most expensive bottle in the house, drinks it all with Kuryakin, and then smiles and walks to the door.

“You need to pay your tab,” says the bartender.

Napoleon says, “Do you take IOUs?”

(Two.)

They’re at a party which is not a club, but is so large it challenges zoning laws to the extent that Napoleon thinks it counts, when a drunk kid says, “Hey man, that’s a weird accent you’ve got. What are you, some sort of commie? Some commie mommy’s boy?”

Napoleon handles this one; he doesn’t want to actually be on the lam for murder before his first day at the office. He is trying to avoid prison, not leap straight into its metal jaws. That said, his knuckles sting, and three people are missing teeth. Kuryakin shakes with that bear-like rage until he buys him a drink at a bar they don’t get thrown out of.

(Three.)

After that, the night starts to blur. They go to places he doesn’t remember the names of. He does remember that he tried to match drinks with a redneck and succeeded.

(Four, five, many.)

It’s well after dawn when they stumble into the hotel, but also well before 9AM. This is less an act of sportsmanship and more an act of god. Napoleon realizes only when they get to Gaby’s door that he and Kuryakin are half draped on the other, keeping each other upright. He hasn’t been this drunk of his own volition in years. He doesn’t remember how many years. He’s just happy he remembered which hotel and more specifically, which room was Gaby’s.

“Oh,” she says when she sees them. Her sunglasses are on even though they’re indoors, and he grins.

She screws her face up at him. “What’s your number?” she asks, and then, before they can answer, she turns around and walks into her room.

She leaves the door open for them and they follow her like little lost boys to her Wendy.

“Twelve,” he announces.

“Thirteen,” Kuryakin counters. Frankly, Napoleon isn’t sure at all, and arguing with Kuryakin would require him to either lie with more skill than he currently has, or recall the night, which he currently can’t.

She sits down on her bed, it’s a queen, and slips off her shoes. Her toes are tiny, and red from walking all night. She sighs, lays down, and says, “Pour me a glass.”

“How many did you get?”

Bug-eyed with the sunglasses still on, she turns her head slightly to look at him, and then Kuryakin. “I said, pour me a glass.” She’s still wearing her perfect little sweater shell, and her purse is pinned half under her body.

He pulls away, an order is an order after all, and Kuryakin lists to the side until Napoleon props him against the bed, which he proceeds to collapse backwards onto. He is several sheets to the wind himself, but he’ll be damned if he shows it. He pours a large, large glass of vodka because he’s too slow to pour a small one and walks it, perhaps less steadily than he intended, to the bed that now holds both Gaby and Illya in its fluffy embrace.

“How many?”

“Nineteen.”

“You’re lying.”

Kuryakin struggles upright against the pillows, eyes red and bleary, but his speech is surprisingly un-slurred. Whatever language training he had drilled into him by the KGB is holding strong. “Gaby is your senior agent.”

Without moving an inch Gaby replies, “Yes, Napoleon, are you accusing your senior agent of lying?”

She and Illya are sliding against one another, and it’s a miracle neither of them have ended up in the other’s lap. He sets the drink none of them need on the bedstand and then, somehow, for a reason he can’t possibly conceive since he has his own hotel room not two flights up, finds himself sinking onto the bed as well. He wonders, idly as his body fits into the groove between them, and mostly on top of Kuryakin, if his drink has been laced again. But the muddiness of his mind is not the cottony, dry mouth sort, and even as he thinks that, he decides he should stop thinking altogether.

“You’re drunk,” Kuryakin says against his shoulder; his bulk must be half crushing him, but Kuryakin is a giant. He’ll be fine.

“So are you,” he says against Gaby’s hair.

“So am I!” sings Gaby, who has slipped out from atop her purse and is the only one in the room who looks remotely comfortable, although her sunglasses are skewed against her cheek and the pillow, and then he passes out.

The phone ringing four hours later wakes them up. Illya throws it against the wall.

“I hate...”

“Everything,” Gaby fills in. “Absolutely everything. And everyone. Don’t even think about talking to me.”

They’re late on their first day. Gaby is late on whatever day she’s on. Napoleon blearily puts on shoes, smooths the shirt he wore out last night and slowly, very slowly, puts one arm and then the other through his suit jacket. Upright, he roots in his jacket for his tracer to follow the tracker he slipped into Waverly’s pocket, but Gaby hands him a glass of water and says, “Oh please. He’ll have found that by now. I’ll show you where to go.”

Where to go is first into a taxi, and then onto a tailor shop a few miles from their hotel. A hand painted sign in the window reads, “Del Floria’s.” Gaby walks in, says hello to the short balding man at the steam press (the steam press all of their clothing is sorely in need of), and into a changing room. Napoleon stands there, and Kuryakin blushes next to him.

After a second, she pulls the curtain back. “What are you waiting for? Get in here.”

Kuryakin clears his throat. “Well, we ought to follow orders...”

“Indeed we must.”

Still fully, and somewhat disappointingly, clothed, Gaby whisks the curtain closed behind them as soon as they step in, twists a coat hook at the back wall, and they tumble through into a stark hallway, the sort both he and Kuryakin have been in many, many times before. He can feel the man stiffening beside him, and he resists the urge to do so himself. They’ve only so recently slipped their leashes.

“Easy, Peril,” he says.

Gaby takes them both by the hands, leading them forward down the hallway. It’s futuristic, the doors whisking open as soon as she gets near. “Welcome, boys,” she says, “to UNCLE,” as they step into a round office with a round table and a massive globe.

“When do I get my drink?” Illya says, and Napoleon can’t think of drinks, refuses to think of drinks. He won’t touch a drop of scotch for at least another 48 hours.

Gaby, still holding onto Napoleon's hand, goes up on tip toes and kisses Illya’s cheek. “When I decide to give it to you,” she says, and then, she turns, pulling Illya with her, as she leans up to kiss Napoleon on the cheek too.

Over her auburn head their eyes meet. Kuryakin shrugs, smiles, and says, “Orders are orders.”

  


**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love!


End file.
